I agree Ulf. I really do. And I mean hell, the people who want to read self help garbage are still going to gravitate to that and not care if it's AI. But the people there to write? Bar's going up and that's not a bad thing.
I suppose it would be helpful for those who aren't fluent in English. I think that is fair for them to use it; otherwise, how could they produce their posts?
This is a fair point, and one some editors and I were discussing. I'm no expert, but I'd like to think can spot the difference between a non-native English speaker using AI (or other program) to help versus someone that simply entered a prompt and received 3000 words in exchange. A writer's voice usually comes through, no matter what.
That's not what was being asked. If they don't have good English skills and they have a story to tell or a point to make, how do they do it without AI?
Thing is, they won't. One way or another, AI enters the mix. Autotranslation, Grammarly, ChatGPT are all obvious aids in such a situation. Otherwise, puzzling it out with the aid of a grammar and dictionary is going to take a long time and produce rocky English anyway.
Die Anfrage wurde missverstanden. Wie können Personen ohne ausreichende Englischkenntnisse ihre Geschichten oder Standpunkte ohne KI-Unterstützung vermitteln?
Die Realität ist, dass sie es wahrscheinlich nicht tun werden. KI wird unweigerlich einbezogen, sei es durch automatische Übersetzung, Grammatikkorrektur oder generative Sprachmodelle. Andernfalls ist die Überwindung von Sprachbarrieren mit nur einem Wörterbuch und einer Grammatik mühsam und führt zu unvollkommenen Ergebnissen.
My German is very rocky, so I used AI and autotranslate to make my words more elegant. Otherwise I'd still be trying to untangle the grammar.
That hasn't been my experience with submissions. Unless the writer's voice is boring and dry as reading an encyclopedia. But maybe some are different than what I'm getting. Easiest no ever, most of them.
You know, I gave this some thought. Here's what I thought to myself. Let's say there's a big writing site in Japan or Germany and they're said to pay writers well. Would I take my articles off Medium and use AI to translate them? No. I would not. I would see that as disrespectful to the readers. I would see my choices as a) learn the language. b) hire a proper translator. Which is a long way of saying thanks for the perspective, Michelle.
I just publishing my last story on Medium and it’s a relief to be done. Tony has basically blessed the self-help garbage that it has devolved into and the payouts are awful. I actually don’t understand why you keep writing about this mess. ME
Mostly because there is no one else that offers what Medium does. I do plan to go paid on Substack, but it's a different model. I will never have consistent income on Medium, but I will never have a piece go viral and pay thousands on Substack. They're different models, so I use both. And thus, write about both. :)
I have pro writing aid which I use as a thesaurus in my fiction; yet it CAN'T understand the way I relate to the subject and object in the sentence. It always changes my verb for something that would suit an annual report. Sometimes a good noun will pop up and I rewrite the sentence because of that. Pro Writing Aid is of no use to me in writing for Medium. It goes for bland and it doesn't understand a personal story's focus and rewrites the text into weak-verbed mush. So I don't use it. Grammarly is helpful for when to use that or which; and when to take out superlatives that weaken written text but add emphasis spoken aloud. I'm keeping my oar in for Medium because the poetry community is so strong. The writing is correct but the stories bore me senseless. If I don't learn something, I don't finish.
If 90 percent of all writing will be AI generated trash content, perhaps that will increase the value of true art. The general public will become so exhausted by garbage that poetry will resonate with greater impact and finally be fully appreciated. We can dream can't we? :)
That's not how it’s going to play out, Walter. I’ve been watching these things for some years. I was the in-house plagiarism checker for ILLUMINATION and I got pretty good at spotting it and hunting down where they got it from. Some were difficult - paraphrased translations of video transcriptions, for example - but if the original text was on the web somewhere, I could generally find it.
Then we began getting submissions that were clearly not written by those submitting them but I couldn’t find the original text. That was my introduction to AI writing. They were pretty bad to start with. Stilted, full of errors and weird phrasing.
Now, two years later, the quality of even the entry-level writing is far superior. At the level of a content mill. It (mostly) makes sense and it’s harder to spot errors. It’s usually the structure that gives it away. I don’t want to read such bland writing regardless of whether it was produced by microchips or neurons.
The best AI writing is creative and engaging. There is a percentage that nobody - even those who claim they can pick AI - can pick. It doesn’t read like it’s written by a robot.
AI, apart from putting words in a row, is good at analysis. These systems are reading our text, and watching our videos, and rummaging through our metadata and they are studying we human beings. Not out of scientific interest so much as to make money by getting us to subscribe to their products, to craft messages that will impel us to buy their affiliates, and to work out ways to make us click on malware.
They are going to get better and better at understanding what makes humanity tick. They are getting massive amounts of feedback. Even discussions like this get fed into the machine.
We simply cannot evolve faster than they can and individually we are constrained by how much thinking machinery of the organic kind we can cram inside our skulls.
Call it AI garbage now, and it’s only the stuff you can pick that's garbage, but we are on the losing side of any evolutionary conflict in the long run.
Well, that was cheery. I might as well eat cake. No, I'm going for cake and ice cream. I think you are so correct. I want to think we will figure something out. Yes, time to seek comfort.
I fear that AI will figure us out. At first "bad actors" will use it for profit or malice and after a while human beings will be entirely out of the equation. This stuff has me worried and it's not about whether it can write good stories or not.
You should eat cake. I should, too. And the cheery news is that AI is not capable of figuring out anything. It's just a pattern recognition machine. Can't write, can't think. Can only recognize word patterns. Nothing more, nothing less. :)
AI as it exists is never going to figure out what makes humanity tick unless they rebuild it from the ground up. AI does not think. It does not even write. AI does math. It calculates odds. Very, very quickly. When you ask it a question, it searches a vast database of text and answers based on the odds of words appearing next to each other. I can grab you a more in depth explanation of what it can and can't do if you're interested. But it's not figuring out humans. It's just analyzing text and calculating odds.
AI also beats grandmasters at chess, drives cars, and makes pictures of former presidents being ravished by dinosaurs, but from a writer’s point of view I think we’re safe for a bit yet/
It is terribly wrong to think that these things are predicative of what will happen. AI drives cars, but I would not trust my life to an AI. The pictures created by AI are nothing but an artifact of AI making new toys. Is that predictive of intelligence? Writing and the things you mention are not indicative of any timeline.
Human beings drive cars. They have accidents. more than two people are killed in traffic accidents each minute. One person is injured every second. It is not a matter of intelligence - AI only has to be as smart as Homer Simpson to equal human intelligence - but of capacity to evolve. Do you think we are going to evolve bigger brains in the next few years?
Your opening sentence that AI is ever going to figure out... It has no capability to do that. The present AI is solely based on numbers. Probabilities. Since when do these numbers feel. emote, create, and so on. For god sakes they don't even do a good job correcting our spelling. For years, AI worked on solving small problems. Not anymore We have idiots like Sam Altman promising that his AI will do it all. Its all going to fall apart. Take my word for it. In its present form AI will not and cannot match human capability. Randy.
Walter, speaking of poetry, we sadly were nominating (and boosting) beautiful poems by this writer at our pub. But we later discovered it was AI generated... I tried generating AI poetry to compare, and yikes, the style matches completely. The guy didn't even deny it.
Now that I've seen what AI poetry looks like, it's easier for me to spot it. None of us editors, nor the curators who boosted the poems, could tell that it was AI. Many people got used to AI prose, but AI poetry was an unknown. AI poetry looks excessively polished, too perfect, with a kind of airy fairy feel. It does look beautiful, so it may fool you unless you know what to look for. :/
That’s fascinating! I would love to publish an article on your experience with AI poetry in my publication Write and Review. If you’re interested in writing something like that, please DM me walterrhein@gmail.com
I am sure you have heard of the meteoric rise of certain Medium accounts thanks to their status as social media influencers - there was talk that their posts are clearly AI written but no action is being taken either because of the tremendous exposure they provide the platform or because they are not behind the paywall - if that is true then I am not sure why anyone is bothered about AI writing anymore (excuse me if I'm being sarcastic)
I have some pretty strong thoughts about the accounts you're mentioning, and was disappointed to see the platform itself talking them up. I understand that different readers will take different paths to the platform--and that's good!--but the writing itself is the stuff of Successories posters (at least that I've seen), and it's tough to see that featured knowing there are tons of writers toiling away in obscurity.
I do too, Kevin. For starters, the math doesn't add up. Got 100K views by posting it to 46K followers on TikTok? So 100% clickthrough on Tiktok and they all brought a friend? Or how's that work? Cause it adds up to a different story than the one that was written.
Oh, Yana, that burns me up and you know I don't get angry--hardly ever. That was a slap in the face to all the genuine writers on Medium. I lost respect for you know who. I used to send people to her. Thank goodness we have Linda.
That's a valid point, Lisa. If an editor is pro-AI it means none of the posts can be paywalled. Lot of work to do for no pay. But to each their own. I suspect they would have a lot of contributors but not so many reads.
I agree that you'll likely not see it here. The platform has a different revenue model, and "the market" would quickly decide that an AI newsletter wasn't for them--at least I'd hope so, anyway.
Where I think we will see more AI generated content is on places like Notes. I can easily see a bot running automated posts driving readers to a newsletter or even offsite.
As for Medium, I used to receive AI submissions here and there. Lately, I've been receiving them quite a bit--and these draft submissions writers need to submit as part of our onboarding process!
I'm giggling. I rejected a writer at two pubs because of content that was AI. Now that writer is on Substack and with a class. The material and other elements of the class are AI. I wanted to like that person.
Interesting subject. My thought is that a lot of the written content on the Internet is already AI generated or is writing that’s so artificially massaged that its connection to a human is distant. So many Internet users and frequenters of retail websites are already accustomed to reading that, so their “ear” for the real thing has already been adversely affected. Will they care or even notice if it goes from 50% to 75% to 90%? I think as humans, we have already been desensitized to advertising and the words it uses to such an extent that I don’t think we even listen fully to anything like that anymore. (That’s why they invented the mute button on the remote.) But those words written for entertainment, enlightenment or education , is a different story. If people begin to accept mediocre writing, mediocre ideas, mediocre attempts at getting a perspective changed because it’s not all that viable anymore, then that becomes worrisome. Many of the positive changes that this world has seen in the last several thousand years has come about through words carefully crafted, filled with emotion and logic, and communicated in a precise way that allowed people to understand, and eventually carry out that change. Imagining that AI would somehow be “in charge of“ this process in anyway, is just a tad frightening.
I'm not, Katie. A lot of people who are smarter than me say that they are going to start degrading. Inbreeding of words. lol. I'm going to read more about it so I understand better and then write about it.
Hang on. Human writing is full of mediocrity. Ask anyone in the education business. You want mediocre writing, just ask an engineer to provide a status report. Not to mention Mein Kampf, possibly one of the most banal and turgid books ever written.
Comparing the best of human literature with the worst of AI is hardly fair or representative. On any reasonable basis, ChatGPT writes far better than the average human being does.
What we are really talking about is the "voice" in writing. We pick AI because it doesn't connect us to someone we can sit down and share a glass of wine with.
I can't see this being an impassable obstacle for a computer network, given time, feedback, and money.
It’s true human writing is filled with mediocrity and always has been. My point was that the great stuff and the good stuff that did come through was written by humans. I don’t believe AI is going to produce the same thing unless it copies humans and if it’s doing that, I fail to see the whole point, unless it’s to generate profit by eliminating those doing it. I could see AI being used to calculate weather patterns or figuring out the best way to launch a ship that will bring astronauts back from the space station, but replace humans in such an important activity - communication and the expression of ideas - I personally don’t get it.
It's very impassable. Because they're not programmed for that. It's a topic I'm seeing more and more about, the downhill slide that's already starting to show. I'm going to learn more about it and then write about it.
Mmm, but it’s no longer a matter of computers being programmed by human beings. Even at the surface level AI has an input. Google's IDX coding environment has an AI-assist function. AI will help you write your code. In deeper systems, AI can reprogram itself; at the micro level of status and vectors, a running AI system is a recursive fractal tangle that no human is going to be able to grasp or explain without years of analysis. We as a species no longer have full control. These things, as Bruce Schneider pointed out last year, are now writing legislation.
There is good AI writing around. Creative, funny, hard-hitting. Everyone here is probably enjoying it right now, even those who say they detest AI.
Why? Because they aren’t picking it up as AI.
We're going to see more of this, simply because natural selection will favour the best, and these products - and their prompting strategies - are evolving a lot faster than human beings can at one generation every twenty-five years.
AI, even the base-grade stuff, isn’t going to remain in some permanent state of woeful. That’s not how the industry is shaping up.
I agree with you on why Medium is setting itself up to be eaten by poor or ESL writers using AI because it is better than they are. Right now, AI *is* better than the vast majority of human beings (who can’t write for nuts anyway, let alone in English) and if you're in Pakistan or wherever and your English skills are poor, naturally you’re going to use AI to some degree just to have a chance of competing (and earning money).
Medium has set itself up to be gamed more than ever.
My favorite point about Substack is that there is no intermediary between the writer and the reader; also that any financial interaction is solely at the buyer's behest. If AI readers want to subscribe to AI writers, who cares? The biggest concern for all writers on every platform is Discover-ability, IMO.
Makes sense. I just hope we don't all get deluged by so much AI content (90%?? Egad!) that too many of us lose the sense of what truly good writing is.
Honestly, I think some people already don't know what good writing is. I have seen nominators post links to pieces and say they don't understand why it wasn't boosted. I usually don't say much. But in one case, I pointed out that the piece switched tenses randomly, used more passive language than active, and had a bunch of other glaring issues that I listed one by one. The nominator said well I thought it was good. What's a person to say to that? lol
Good heavens. I think that's when you have to invoke the advice Thumper gave Bambi: if you can't think of something nice to say, don't say anything at all. ;-)
I am so glad I did not have my mouth full of coffee. lmao
Thanks Nolcha. I agree.
I agree Ulf. I really do. And I mean hell, the people who want to read self help garbage are still going to gravitate to that and not care if it's AI. But the people there to write? Bar's going up and that's not a bad thing.
That's only the beginning
I suppose it would be helpful for those who aren't fluent in English. I think that is fair for them to use it; otherwise, how could they produce their posts?
This is a fair point, and one some editors and I were discussing. I'm no expert, but I'd like to think can spot the difference between a non-native English speaker using AI (or other program) to help versus someone that simply entered a prompt and received 3000 words in exchange. A writer's voice usually comes through, no matter what.
That's not what was being asked. If they don't have good English skills and they have a story to tell or a point to make, how do they do it without AI?
Thing is, they won't. One way or another, AI enters the mix. Autotranslation, Grammarly, ChatGPT are all obvious aids in such a situation. Otherwise, puzzling it out with the aid of a grammar and dictionary is going to take a long time and produce rocky English anyway.
Die Anfrage wurde missverstanden. Wie können Personen ohne ausreichende Englischkenntnisse ihre Geschichten oder Standpunkte ohne KI-Unterstützung vermitteln?
Die Realität ist, dass sie es wahrscheinlich nicht tun werden. KI wird unweigerlich einbezogen, sei es durch automatische Übersetzung, Grammatikkorrektur oder generative Sprachmodelle. Andernfalls ist die Überwindung von Sprachbarrieren mit nur einem Wörterbuch und einer Grammatik mühsam und führt zu unvollkommenen Ergebnissen.
My German is very rocky, so I used AI and autotranslate to make my words more elegant. Otherwise I'd still be trying to untangle the grammar.
That hasn't been my experience with submissions. Unless the writer's voice is boring and dry as reading an encyclopedia. But maybe some are different than what I'm getting. Easiest no ever, most of them.
They can write in their language for the benefit of readers in their language. Or they can learn English. Or both.
You know, I gave this some thought. Here's what I thought to myself. Let's say there's a big writing site in Japan or Germany and they're said to pay writers well. Would I take my articles off Medium and use AI to translate them? No. I would not. I would see that as disrespectful to the readers. I would see my choices as a) learn the language. b) hire a proper translator. Which is a long way of saying thanks for the perspective, Michelle.
Not everyone has your standards, Linda. It would be a far better world if they did.
I just publishing my last story on Medium and it’s a relief to be done. Tony has basically blessed the self-help garbage that it has devolved into and the payouts are awful. I actually don’t understand why you keep writing about this mess. ME
Mostly because there is no one else that offers what Medium does. I do plan to go paid on Substack, but it's a different model. I will never have consistent income on Medium, but I will never have a piece go viral and pay thousands on Substack. They're different models, so I use both. And thus, write about both. :)
I have pro writing aid which I use as a thesaurus in my fiction; yet it CAN'T understand the way I relate to the subject and object in the sentence. It always changes my verb for something that would suit an annual report. Sometimes a good noun will pop up and I rewrite the sentence because of that. Pro Writing Aid is of no use to me in writing for Medium. It goes for bland and it doesn't understand a personal story's focus and rewrites the text into weak-verbed mush. So I don't use it. Grammarly is helpful for when to use that or which; and when to take out superlatives that weaken written text but add emphasis spoken aloud. I'm keeping my oar in for Medium because the poetry community is so strong. The writing is correct but the stories bore me senseless. If I don't learn something, I don't finish.
I think you are right.
If 90 percent of all writing will be AI generated trash content, perhaps that will increase the value of true art. The general public will become so exhausted by garbage that poetry will resonate with greater impact and finally be fully appreciated. We can dream can't we? :)
We should be so lucky!
That's not how it’s going to play out, Walter. I’ve been watching these things for some years. I was the in-house plagiarism checker for ILLUMINATION and I got pretty good at spotting it and hunting down where they got it from. Some were difficult - paraphrased translations of video transcriptions, for example - but if the original text was on the web somewhere, I could generally find it.
Then we began getting submissions that were clearly not written by those submitting them but I couldn’t find the original text. That was my introduction to AI writing. They were pretty bad to start with. Stilted, full of errors and weird phrasing.
Now, two years later, the quality of even the entry-level writing is far superior. At the level of a content mill. It (mostly) makes sense and it’s harder to spot errors. It’s usually the structure that gives it away. I don’t want to read such bland writing regardless of whether it was produced by microchips or neurons.
The best AI writing is creative and engaging. There is a percentage that nobody - even those who claim they can pick AI - can pick. It doesn’t read like it’s written by a robot.
AI, apart from putting words in a row, is good at analysis. These systems are reading our text, and watching our videos, and rummaging through our metadata and they are studying we human beings. Not out of scientific interest so much as to make money by getting us to subscribe to their products, to craft messages that will impel us to buy their affiliates, and to work out ways to make us click on malware.
They are going to get better and better at understanding what makes humanity tick. They are getting massive amounts of feedback. Even discussions like this get fed into the machine.
We simply cannot evolve faster than they can and individually we are constrained by how much thinking machinery of the organic kind we can cram inside our skulls.
Call it AI garbage now, and it’s only the stuff you can pick that's garbage, but we are on the losing side of any evolutionary conflict in the long run.
Well, that was cheery. I might as well eat cake. No, I'm going for cake and ice cream. I think you are so correct. I want to think we will figure something out. Yes, time to seek comfort.
I fear that AI will figure us out. At first "bad actors" will use it for profit or malice and after a while human beings will be entirely out of the equation. This stuff has me worried and it's not about whether it can write good stories or not.
AI cannot figure us out. It's a probability calculator. That's all it is. This might help: https://medium.com/inspired-writer/yes-chatgpt-can-hurt-writers-but-not-the-way-you-think-f5118e0307db
You should eat cake. I should, too. And the cheery news is that AI is not capable of figuring out anything. It's just a pattern recognition machine. Can't write, can't think. Can only recognize word patterns. Nothing more, nothing less. :)
This made me laugh, Katie. I'm in agreement.
AI as it exists is never going to figure out what makes humanity tick unless they rebuild it from the ground up. AI does not think. It does not even write. AI does math. It calculates odds. Very, very quickly. When you ask it a question, it searches a vast database of text and answers based on the odds of words appearing next to each other. I can grab you a more in depth explanation of what it can and can't do if you're interested. But it's not figuring out humans. It's just analyzing text and calculating odds.
AI also beats grandmasters at chess, drives cars, and makes pictures of former presidents being ravished by dinosaurs, but from a writer’s point of view I think we’re safe for a bit yet/
It is terribly wrong to think that these things are predicative of what will happen. AI drives cars, but I would not trust my life to an AI. The pictures created by AI are nothing but an artifact of AI making new toys. Is that predictive of intelligence? Writing and the things you mention are not indicative of any timeline.
Human beings drive cars. They have accidents. more than two people are killed in traffic accidents each minute. One person is injured every second. It is not a matter of intelligence - AI only has to be as smart as Homer Simpson to equal human intelligence - but of capacity to evolve. Do you think we are going to evolve bigger brains in the next few years?
Your opening sentence that AI is ever going to figure out... It has no capability to do that. The present AI is solely based on numbers. Probabilities. Since when do these numbers feel. emote, create, and so on. For god sakes they don't even do a good job correcting our spelling. For years, AI worked on solving small problems. Not anymore We have idiots like Sam Altman promising that his AI will do it all. Its all going to fall apart. Take my word for it. In its present form AI will not and cannot match human capability. Randy.
I think you are correct. The same applies to AI images. If everything shines we will want something charming and dusty.
We can. That's a topic I plan to write about :)
Walter, speaking of poetry, we sadly were nominating (and boosting) beautiful poems by this writer at our pub. But we later discovered it was AI generated... I tried generating AI poetry to compare, and yikes, the style matches completely. The guy didn't even deny it.
Now that I've seen what AI poetry looks like, it's easier for me to spot it. None of us editors, nor the curators who boosted the poems, could tell that it was AI. Many people got used to AI prose, but AI poetry was an unknown. AI poetry looks excessively polished, too perfect, with a kind of airy fairy feel. It does look beautiful, so it may fool you unless you know what to look for. :/
That’s fascinating! I would love to publish an article on your experience with AI poetry in my publication Write and Review. If you’re interested in writing something like that, please DM me walterrhein@gmail.com
Sure, I will email you!
I like this. It will leave a room for pure art to be more valuable
I am sure you have heard of the meteoric rise of certain Medium accounts thanks to their status as social media influencers - there was talk that their posts are clearly AI written but no action is being taken either because of the tremendous exposure they provide the platform or because they are not behind the paywall - if that is true then I am not sure why anyone is bothered about AI writing anymore (excuse me if I'm being sarcastic)
I have some pretty strong thoughts about the accounts you're mentioning, and was disappointed to see the platform itself talking them up. I understand that different readers will take different paths to the platform--and that's good!--but the writing itself is the stuff of Successories posters (at least that I've seen), and it's tough to see that featured knowing there are tons of writers toiling away in obscurity.
I do too, Kevin. For starters, the math doesn't add up. Got 100K views by posting it to 46K followers on TikTok? So 100% clickthrough on Tiktok and they all brought a friend? Or how's that work? Cause it adds up to a different story than the one that was written.
Yeah the whole thing felt like a farce. Not sure what they were thinking. A friend bluntly said, "Medium has hit a new low." 🤣
Right?! I wish I knew what the thought process there was. Again, I get that readers are coming to Medium via new paths, but still...
Yes, that has been so baffling to me as well.
Oh, Yana, that burns me up and you know I don't get angry--hardly ever. That was a slap in the face to all the genuine writers on Medium. I lost respect for you know who. I used to send people to her. Thank goodness we have Linda.
Thank you Katie. You're also so sweet to me :)
I think Medium didn't do enough homework on that one. The math doesn't work if one were to stop and look real hard.
I guess it depends on whether all editors think like you and are focused on a certain view of quality. But what if editors are AI based, too?
That's a valid point, Lisa. If an editor is pro-AI it means none of the posts can be paywalled. Lot of work to do for no pay. But to each their own. I suspect they would have a lot of contributors but not so many reads.
I agree that you'll likely not see it here. The platform has a different revenue model, and "the market" would quickly decide that an AI newsletter wasn't for them--at least I'd hope so, anyway.
Where I think we will see more AI generated content is on places like Notes. I can easily see a bot running automated posts driving readers to a newsletter or even offsite.
As for Medium, I used to receive AI submissions here and there. Lately, I've been receiving them quite a bit--and these draft submissions writers need to submit as part of our onboarding process!
I'm giggling. I rejected a writer at two pubs because of content that was AI. Now that writer is on Substack and with a class. The material and other elements of the class are AI. I wanted to like that person.
Whoa!
That's wild, Katie. Strange what people will pay for
Interesting subject. My thought is that a lot of the written content on the Internet is already AI generated or is writing that’s so artificially massaged that its connection to a human is distant. So many Internet users and frequenters of retail websites are already accustomed to reading that, so their “ear” for the real thing has already been adversely affected. Will they care or even notice if it goes from 50% to 75% to 90%? I think as humans, we have already been desensitized to advertising and the words it uses to such an extent that I don’t think we even listen fully to anything like that anymore. (That’s why they invented the mute button on the remote.) But those words written for entertainment, enlightenment or education , is a different story. If people begin to accept mediocre writing, mediocre ideas, mediocre attempts at getting a perspective changed because it’s not all that viable anymore, then that becomes worrisome. Many of the positive changes that this world has seen in the last several thousand years has come about through words carefully crafted, filled with emotion and logic, and communicated in a precise way that allowed people to understand, and eventually carry out that change. Imagining that AI would somehow be “in charge of“ this process in anyway, is just a tad frightening.
I'm frightened.
I'm not, Katie. A lot of people who are smarter than me say that they are going to start degrading. Inbreeding of words. lol. I'm going to read more about it so I understand better and then write about it.
Hang on. Human writing is full of mediocrity. Ask anyone in the education business. You want mediocre writing, just ask an engineer to provide a status report. Not to mention Mein Kampf, possibly one of the most banal and turgid books ever written.
Comparing the best of human literature with the worst of AI is hardly fair or representative. On any reasonable basis, ChatGPT writes far better than the average human being does.
What we are really talking about is the "voice" in writing. We pick AI because it doesn't connect us to someone we can sit down and share a glass of wine with.
I can't see this being an impassable obstacle for a computer network, given time, feedback, and money.
It’s true human writing is filled with mediocrity and always has been. My point was that the great stuff and the good stuff that did come through was written by humans. I don’t believe AI is going to produce the same thing unless it copies humans and if it’s doing that, I fail to see the whole point, unless it’s to generate profit by eliminating those doing it. I could see AI being used to calculate weather patterns or figuring out the best way to launch a ship that will bring astronauts back from the space station, but replace humans in such an important activity - communication and the expression of ideas - I personally don’t get it.
It's very impassable. Because they're not programmed for that. It's a topic I'm seeing more and more about, the downhill slide that's already starting to show. I'm going to learn more about it and then write about it.
Mmm, but it’s no longer a matter of computers being programmed by human beings. Even at the surface level AI has an input. Google's IDX coding environment has an AI-assist function. AI will help you write your code. In deeper systems, AI can reprogram itself; at the micro level of status and vectors, a running AI system is a recursive fractal tangle that no human is going to be able to grasp or explain without years of analysis. We as a species no longer have full control. These things, as Bruce Schneider pointed out last year, are now writing legislation.
I read about AI cannibalizing itself and degrading in a very short time. Might have to write about that
There is good AI writing around. Creative, funny, hard-hitting. Everyone here is probably enjoying it right now, even those who say they detest AI.
Why? Because they aren’t picking it up as AI.
We're going to see more of this, simply because natural selection will favour the best, and these products - and their prompting strategies - are evolving a lot faster than human beings can at one generation every twenty-five years.
AI, even the base-grade stuff, isn’t going to remain in some permanent state of woeful. That’s not how the industry is shaping up.
I agree with you on why Medium is setting itself up to be eaten by poor or ESL writers using AI because it is better than they are. Right now, AI *is* better than the vast majority of human beings (who can’t write for nuts anyway, let alone in English) and if you're in Pakistan or wherever and your English skills are poor, naturally you’re going to use AI to some degree just to have a chance of competing (and earning money).
Medium has set itself up to be gamed more than ever.
I was in such a good mood today. Is this what is meant by the truth hurts?
My favorite point about Substack is that there is no intermediary between the writer and the reader; also that any financial interaction is solely at the buyer's behest. If AI readers want to subscribe to AI writers, who cares? The biggest concern for all writers on every platform is Discover-ability, IMO.
Makes sense. I just hope we don't all get deluged by so much AI content (90%?? Egad!) that too many of us lose the sense of what truly good writing is.
Honestly, I think some people already don't know what good writing is. I have seen nominators post links to pieces and say they don't understand why it wasn't boosted. I usually don't say much. But in one case, I pointed out that the piece switched tenses randomly, used more passive language than active, and had a bunch of other glaring issues that I listed one by one. The nominator said well I thought it was good. What's a person to say to that? lol
Good heavens. I think that's when you have to invoke the advice Thumper gave Bambi: if you can't think of something nice to say, don't say anything at all. ;-)
Yup. And also, when someone says they sincerely and genuinely want to know, tiptoe out of the room very quietly, because they probably don't.